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In 1985, Nature published a paper arguing that women would outrun men in marathons by 2000. Like so many other things that were supposed to happen “in the year 2000,” this prediction never came to fruition. Women’s finishing times were indeed improving rapidly as compared to the rate of men’s improvements, but that was likely because women were so much newer to distance running as compared to men. As science writer Rose Eveleth has explained, that Nature paper “extrapolated linearly from a few points of early data. (Its conclusions are mocked in many entry-level statistics courses.)” In 2016, the fastest men runners are still about 12 percent faster than the fastest women, and most exercise scientists doubt that women will ever outperform men at the elite marathon level.

The other day I was swimming at Shepperton lake when a storm blew in. I saw a flash on the horizon, turned to a nearby swimmer and asked: “was that lightning?”

“Well, I don’t think you got caught by a speed camera,” he replied.

Thanks!

As most of you will know, lightning is supposed to bad for swimmers. Like any responsible venue operator would, the staff at Shepperton evacuated the lake, but it still took me a few anxious minutes to get out, during which time I saw several more lightning strikes. I started trying to figure out the probability of lightning hitting me or the lake, and what the consequences might be if it did.

Large numbers of people love swimming in the sea, and feel perfectly safe doing so. Yet many of them don't realise just how easy it is to drown when you're having fun on the beach. Most of us assume that alcohol is to blame when tragedies of this kind occur. However, more often than not there is a different cause — rip currents.

He is an International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame Inductee, also a committee Member for Santa Barbara Channel Swim Association, Manhattan, the Lee swim, and In Search of Memphre, amongst other things, as he seems to like being on committees. He is also persistently confused by the difference between an email subject line and the body of an email text. It’s not unusual to get an entire illegible paragraph in the subject line.

An interesting article posted by Vicki Keith on her blog June 6, 2016 as instigation of a discussion on the use of pace swimmers.

As a new open water swimming season gets under way, I ask you, why do we do this? What do we hope to achieve? Some people swim for the glory of a record, be it speed, or distance or even a world first, some to challenge themselves and test their mettle, some for the camaraderie of working as a team as everyone pulls together to achieve the perceived impossible. There are probably as many reasons to swim open water, as there are swimmers.

Well that didn’t go to plan. Instead of recovering from a celebratory Babycham in the White Horse in Dover I found myself in a hospital bed in Ashford on Sunday morning. My attempt to swim the English Channel was foiled in French inshore waters by Swimming Induced Pulmonary Edema (SIPE). I’d been airlifted from my support boat and was in a resuss bed.

It was 90 years ago today that American swimmer Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.

It was her second attempt, after being pulled from the water the first time for “resting, floating face-down” a year earlier, and she became, at 19, the sixth person to swim the 21-and-a-bit miles between England and France.

When Ederle, who set off from Cap Gris Nez, arrived on the beach at Kingsdown, Kent, after choppy waters turned the usual 21 miles into about 35, she was greeted by a customs official who asked to see her passport. When she returned to New York she was met by a ticker-tape parade.

Conventional wisdom says that Jamie MacMahan was doing everything right when, about a decade ago, he found himself caught in a rip current while swimming off the coast of Monterey, California. Rips flow seaward, out to deep water, so beach access signs across the country advise swimmers to paddle parallel to the beach to escape the them. The savage, dread-inducing flows kill more beachgoers each year than any other threat and MacMahan, a professor of oceanography and a strong swimmer, was following the “swim parallel” gospel, paddling steadily. But as he thrashed in the cold Pacific, the rip refused to relent. “I thought, ‘That’s interesting,’” MacMahan says.